How much carbon and aerosols are released during Santa Ana fires?

Controlling factors for combustion completeness, carbon losses, and mortality (UCI)

We will use the field measurements and the Wildfire and MASTER imagery to better understand the controls on fire severity. We will compare the in-situ and remote-sensing-derived measures of combustion completeness, mortality, and carbon loss with:

1. Pre-burn vegetation characteristics, including vegetation type, species composition, and woody/perennial vs herbaceous vegetation (based on field measurements and prefire imagery);
2. The weather during the fire (temperature, relative humidity and wind)
;
3. Antecedent climate at various lags (previous growing season temperature, drought, precipitation from reconstructed climate data; see Section 3.4;
4. Fire history (the number of previous fires and time since last fire from FRAP data).

ANOVA analysis will be applied to test how much variation in fire severity and combustion completeness can be explained by each variable. We will use a stepwise linear regression to derive an empirical relationship between CC/mortality and the significant contributing variables. We will explore semilog and log-log transformations if bivariate data doesn’t fit a linear relationship.